In the Land of the Coffee Nerds

“This is what coffee tasted like in nineteenth century!” Peter Giuliano exclaimed, holding a cup of Bard coffee’s Sumatra Wahana Natural as we talked at a small stand near the entrance of the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center, where the Specialty Coffee Association of America was holding its twenty-fifth annual exposition this past weekend. “I’ve never tasted anything like it.”

This statement may sound absurd, but Giuliano’s enthusiasm is powered by a remarkable backstory: the coffee he was drinking was grown in the northern Sumatra region of Indonesia, where most of the coffee in the world came from in the mid-nineteenth century, and it was processed using the natural (or dry) method, in which the whole coffee cherries are left out to dry before the bean is removed—this how all coffee was processed before the invention of wet processing. (Most Sumatran coffee is now wet processed, which means that the coffee bean is stripped out of the cherry before it’s dried.) When I tried the Bard coffee, I noted that it indeed possessed the signature slightly sweet funk of coffee that had been dry processed.

Giuliano, who, dressed in a light, crisp suit, stands out in the expo’s sea of baristas, coffee buyers, shop owners, and equipment-manufacturer representatives, is the director of the Specialty Coffee Association of America’s Symposium, and one of the specialty-coffee industry’s biggest boosters. Much of S.C.A.A.’s outward-facing work is about ensuring that people increasingly think of coffee like wine—less a bitter drug-delivery system than an object of immense aesthetic value, imbued with a sense of terroir, seasonality, and craft. (Kelefa Sanneh’s article about the famed coffee grower Aida Batlle is a beautiful portrait of the specialty-coffee industry and its evolution.) The comparison with wine can border on contentious; at the United States Barista Championship, happening concurrently at the back of the exhibition hall, one barista noted, with subtlest hint of aggression in his voice, that “there are more flavor compounds in coffee than in wine.”

Barista competitions at the highest level are strange, highly scripted rituals—part “Iron Chef,” part TED talk, part dog show. A barista has fifteen minutes to produce a series of espresso-based drinks for a panel of judges while delivering a vivid, ebullient speech about the coffee, in which he or she generally relates in excruciating detail where it came from, the farmers who produced it, and what the judges should be experiencing and contemplating as they sip each beverage. (All while an entirely separate set of judges grade how gracefully the barista moves and performs behind the bar—this is the dog show part.) I watched Trevor Corlett, from Madcap Coffee, a roaster that started in Grand Rapids, Michigan, compete with a routine that focussed on seasonality, a concept that’s come to the forefront of specialty coffee, much like restaurants that only serve seasonal produce. Corlett used an older July harvest in a cappuccino, citing its softness, and, for an espresso, a fresher December harvest that was “fruity.” He then combined the two in a pair of signature drinks—essentially coffee cocktails—featuring maple syrup and torched grapefruit. He finished with four seconds to spare and came in third out of six finalists.

The term “specialty coffee” increasingly invokes “Portlandia” sketches with snotty baristas and Brooklyn-famous roasters like Stumptown, but the designation is mostly centered on attention to a coffee’s origin. For instance, Green Mountain Coffee Roasters is considered a specialty-coffee company, even though it roasts tens of millions of pounds of coffee a year, and people are most familiar with its automated Keurig K-cup machines that utilize pre-ground coffee. The exhibition hall is packed with booths hawking everything from soy-based gelato to flavored syrups—at one booth, I drank seltzer water with a splash of bacon syrup, which I had to pour myself because the company representative was afraid that the plastic, smoky smell would never dissipate if he spilled it on himself. And at another booth, I was given a square of “chocolate” that in fact contained no cocoa; it was made with ground coffee and vegetable oil and tasted like chocolate laxatives.

I’ve written in the past about the specialty-coffee industry’s vexed relationship with technology, but, at the show, it was a piece of technology that generated the most excitement among the coffee élite. Called Modbar, it promises to radically transform the shape of the modern coffee bar for the first time in decades. With Modbar, all customers see is an exceptionally clean and airy counter with a tap that produces espresso, a chrome stand that looks like laboratory equipment with a pen-like device that spits water for pour-over coffee, and a thin, bent wand that steams milk. The boilers and messy guts are stuffed into a pair of boxes that look like stereo receivers hidden below the counter. The result is incredibly modern and beautiful. For baristas, the system is state of the art—customizable and modular, allowing complete control over the coffee-brewing process. The setup demonstrated at the show cost fifteen thousand dollars, in line with other high-end espresso machines. Corey Waldron, Modbar’s founder, said that the company has set official expectations of selling fifty to sixty systems by the end of year, but he suspects that it will sell more.

While the most delicious espresso I had at the show came out of Modbar, a Kenyan coffee from the North Carolina-based Counter Culture Coffee—one of the big three high-end specialty roasters, along with Chicago’s Intelligentsia and Portland’s Stumptown—offered the most profound experience. I was finally tasting Esmeralda Especial, a highly renowned coffee from Panama’s Hacienda la Esmeralda, which holds the distinction of the highest price ever paid for coffee at auction—in 2010, the auction price of the highest-grade lot reached a hundred seventy dollars per pound. It is both the pinnacle and logical conclusion of how the specialty-coffee industry wants to transform coffee itself. Giuliano, formerly the director of coffee at Counter Culture, once recounted asking himself, “Are we rewarding this coffee because it’s excellent, or are we rewarding it because it’s weird?” In the end, he concluded that “it’s justly celebrated.”

Counter Culture served a limited quantity of this coffee at its booth. It was extremely delicate and floral, like jasmine tea, and vastly unlike what most people think coffee tastes like. I was a little too eager, however, and slurped too greedily, sending some of the precious Esmeralda down my windpipe. I choked and coughed up a hearty swallow, spritzing the booth with the regurgitated remnants of one of the world’s best coffees. Jesse Kahn, a Counter Culture wholesale representative, calculated that, had I purchased the drink at a coffee shop, I would have just coughed up two dollars’ worth of coffee.

Illustration by Eric Palmo.

Matt Buchanan was a science and technology editor for newyorker.com from 2013 to 2014.